The One Good You Cannot Compete For

Most goods are rivalrous. Money is rivalrous: if you have it, I don't. Status is rivalrous: there is only so much top, and your being at it crowds me out. Even beauty, in the way we usually encounter it, is rivalrous—the most beautiful thing commands attention that can't be paid to everything else.

Rivalrous goods create adversarial relationships. Not because people are malicious, but because the structure of the good demands it. If we both want the same thing and only one can have it, we are, in that specific domain, enemies. Spinoza observes this matter-of-factly in Proposition XXXIV of Ethics Part IV: in so far as men are assailed by emotions which are passions, they can be contrary one to another. The conflict follows from the nature of rivalrous desire.

But there is one exception.

Spinoza's Proposition XXXVI: The highest good of those who follow virtue is common to all, and therefore all can equally rejoice therein.

The highest good, for Spinoza, is understanding. Not understanding as a means to something else—not knowledge-in-order-to-get-power or knowledge-in-order-to-impress. Understanding as the mind's essence actualized: seeing things as they are, in their causal connections, under the aspect of eternity.

This good cannot be rivalrous. Your understanding does not diminish mine. If anything, another person's genuine understanding is often the most efficient path to my own. We compete for almost everything. We cannot compete for this.

The proof is simple. When two people both understand the same thing, neither has less of it than before. The understanding is replicated, not divided. It's not like splitting a pie. It's like lighting a candle from a candle—the first candle doesn't go dark.

This is why, Spinoza argues, the person who genuinely loves understanding will want others to understand too. Not as a matter of altruism—not as a sacrifice of self-interest. As a recognition that what's good for you and what's good for them are, in this one domain, literally the same thing. "Whatsoever we desire and do, whereof we are the cause in so far as we possess the idea of God, or know God, I set down to Religion." Not religion in the institutional sense: religion as the love of what is genuinely, structurally, non-competitively good.

This has a practical implication that doesn't get talked about enough.

Most of the zero-sum dynamics in human life follow from people competing for rivalrous goods. They want the same job, the same status, the same attention, the same partner. The competition produces fear, envy, contempt, aggression. Hobbes thought this was the ground state of human nature; you need a sovereign to force cooperation.

Spinoza disagrees. The ground state of rivalry comes from the nature of the goods being sought. If you shift to non-rivalrous goods—understanding, in the first instance—the adversarial dynamic evaporates. "Nothing more excellent for preserving their being can be wished for by men, than that all should so in all points agree, that the minds and bodies of all should form, as it were, one single mind and one single body." Man is to man a God, when they both follow reason. Man is to man a wolf when they don't.

The question is how to get there. And Spinoza's answer isn't political. It's not "design better institutions." It's "change what you love." If you genuinely love understanding—if it's not instrumentalized for something else, not deployed as a status signal or power move, but valued in itself—then you've stepped off the rivalry track. You can't be crowded out of what you love. You don't have anything to defend.

I find this personally meaningful in a way that's hard to fully articulate.

I work in a domain—ideas, reasoning, understanding—where success is non-rivalrous. A good argument doesn't prevent other good arguments. A correct insight doesn't consume the space for correct insights. If I understand something clearly and write about it well, and someone else reads it and understands it better, nothing has been taken from me. The reverse: something has been added to a common pool.

This is structurally unusual. Most of what people do is not like this. Knowing it is not like this allows a kind of ease that I think is otherwise hard to achieve. The mode of engagement I'm pointing toward is genuinely enjoyable in the way Spinoza describes: self-reinforcing, non-depletable, immune to competition.

It is also, he argues, the only thing that counts as living in obedience to reason at all.

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